Wondering what to make of ‘Google Instant‘? It’s the brand new search engine Google unleashed upon us this week and it dynamically changes your search results as you type. Brave new dawn or over hyped in an age where Twitter and Facebook bring our friends’ suggestions straight to us?

TrustedReviews has published by thoughts on the subject and here are some extracts below. You’ll find the full article here.

Google Instant: Game Changer or has the Game Changed?

Google may not have been the first search engine, but it has been by far the most successful. Since it launched on 15 September 1997 Google.com has become the most visited website on the Internet and receives more than a billion search requests per day.

It is part of the modern lexicon: we don’t search, we ‘Google it’ and if you are to believe the hype Google thinks this week it made the most significant advancement in its search technology to date…

Watched in action (see video above) Google Instant is impressive, but it has drawn a mixed reaction from both users and critics so far. Why? I think I know…

Wolfram Alpha, WolframAlpha, Wolfram|Alpha – however you want to say it – has the Internet very excited. It chooses to avoid the term ‘search engine’ in favour of “computational knowledge engine” and works very differently from Google by providing actual answers to questions rather than links to potential answers. Questions can be as simple as How tall in the Eiffel Tower? to real time mathematical calculation of satellite positions across the sky. If this sounds impressive, that’s because it is and while I’ve written an extensive and enthusiastic piece about Wolfram Alpha on TrustedReviews the fact is it isn’t perfect. So what are the bad points?

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in a product before you commit to reading lengthy reviews on your favourites sites and/or magazines. For a more detailed description please read: the Rules

Just the Bad Points Review: Wolfram Alpha

It takes time and practice to learn the correct terminology to get good results from Wolfram Alpha

Natural language interpretation is poor, more than 25% of queries trigger the response: “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”

It potentially damages traffic to traditional websites which spend time answering queries in greater detail

Topics such as mathematics, science, medicine and currency help academics but real world public usefulness is much lower at present

Many answers have little context

Answers take longer to load than the results from traditional search engines

Answers can be very dry. A search for Shakespeare, for example, could do with more than just his date/place of birth and a rather cold ‘timeline’

We know little of the financial security behind the project other than “Infrastructure for this computation provided by Wolfram|Alpha launch partner Dell, Inc”

Google is working on something similar with its Google Squared search project and its huge resources may outgun Wolfram Alpha